COMPANY: AVANTAR

Sobox

About The Project

In early 2016 I started working at Avantar and was hired to help design for their Yellow Pages Digital Marketing brand. I designed several different pages for their website along with some of their marketing materials. After three months, they were very satisfied with the work I had done for Yellow Pages so they felt that I would be a good fit to work on a new project for them. At that time working as a junior I didn’t know what to expect but was excited to be able to create a product that would make a difference.

In this case study I will talk about different sections of the product, some of the problems I ran into and what I did to solve these problems.

Purpose

Avantar wanted to create a new line of revenue by leveraging its users from their Yellow Pages Digital Marketing brand. They wanted a B2B online platform that would help local businesses manage and earn positive reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and other platforms for their customers. To promote positive reviews we had our clients send their customers a message via text that asked them to take time to write a review on their prefered platform.

The Team

The product team was fairly small and consisted of a product manager, project manager, two designers, and three developers. Even though the design team was small, we were able to deliver designs in a very efficient way.

My Role

I was the main designer for Sobox. I contributed on a lot of the research, created most of the wireframes, designed all of the high fidelity mockups, prototyped and tested each new version we came up with. I also collaborated a lot on the design for the Sobox Account Manager.

Research

I worked together with a product manager to research industries and to develop criteria to determine who our users would be. Together, we created personas to help us make decisions, set priorities and create empathy between the team and our users.

As we gathered information from different business types we realized that certain industries were a better fit for our MVP version of the product. We developed a point system that helped us decide what industries we wanted to target first.

Deliverables

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, SITE MAP AND FLOW

To initiate the project I collaborated with the PM and the other UX designer on the architecture and the user flow of the product. We created sitemaps to better visualize the structure of Sobox. We also developed vocabulary to help communication between the design team and the development team.

WIREFRAMES

I created most of the wireframes for Sobox and collaborated on the wireframes for Account Manager with the other UX designer. All of the wireframes were done on paper as well as on a whiteboard. By reviewing our research and findings, I came up with several iteration of the product. It would often take several iteration to finally get the desired outcome. Even though our product would mostly live in desktop we felt that it was important to also have a mobile version. Creating mobile first designs were a big part of our design process.

HI-FIDELITY MOCKUPS

Once we finalized the MVP version of the style guide, the complete UI design of Sobox was delegated to me. At the same time, I collaborated with the other UX designer on the designs for Account Manager. I studied and followed the structure of the product to create the right flow for the screens. I translated all approved wireframes into hi-fidelity mockups.

PROTOTYPING AND USER TESTING

I was responsible for prototyping and user testing and used InVision to create working prototypes for Sobox. Adobe XD was used to create Account Manager and we were able to use their prototyping tool to create the working prototypes.

I tested the products on a set group of clients that were willing to help us improve the product. I ran tests on seven individuals every time I did a round of testing. For every feature we completed, I would run the similar type of test.

Later on I used the test results to adjust and improve the design of Sobox.

Problems & Solutions

MESSAGE QUEUE

After a few months we noticed a pattern in how our clients were using sobox. We realized that they would gather a lot of phone numbers throughout the day and then they would send a message to a mass number of their customers that they had gathered throughout a period of time. For the MVP version we created more fields for our customers to input several phone numbers so that they could send a large amount of messages. A CVS file could also be uploaded but it was an inefficient way for our clients to send a message to their customers. So we needed to find a better solution for how they could send messages more efficiently.

The objective of this project was to create a way for customer to send a large number of messages all at once so we decide to create a messaging queue.

To start off this project I did some research. I looked for products in the market that allowed business to send mass messages to see what they had done. One of the products that I looked at was mailchimp. I looked over their flow to come up with ideas on how to create this queue.

After gathering some ideas, I came up with several iteration of wireframes and submitted them for approval. Once the final iteration was approved, I went ahead and created some high fidelity mockups. After creating the prototype, I tested it with a couple of customer. It took three different rounds of testing and iteration to get the final product.

The results of the queue were great. Customer were able to send messages mass messages more efficiently.

Outcome

The MVP version of Sobox was a complete success. Sobox was able to increase ratings on Google, Yelp, and Facebook in a drastic way for customers. These results helped businesses increase foot traffic and revenue.

What I Learned

During this project I was a junior designer and I learned a lot from it. I experienced new situations. In college I hadn’t really worked with a team of developers, so at the beginning I didn’t know how to communicate very well with them. I also hadn’t had a genuine person above me that would give me feedback. I was just used to making all the final design decisions for my projects. I learned that designing a great product takes a lot of different iterations and that I have to stay positive, rely on my skills, and be confident with my designs.

I learned the importance of having a good design process. At the time I was working at Avantar I had just purchased the book called Sprint. I was able to use some of the ideas of their design process. A lot of their suggestions that they have in the book really helped me improve how I would approach certain tasks.

I learned the importance of designing with empathy to get into the mindset of our target audience and how it could really help in the process of creating a superior product.

I also learned that having well thought out design guidelines is important for creating a consistent product.